Hawaiian Airline Brand & CX
Hawaiian Airlines had become a challenger flying to its own home. With good reasons to choose the competition, they needed to reposition the brand and deliver an experience that resonated with the Australian public.
I led the strategic elements of two major projects:
The development of a holistic brand platform and marketing campaign, where I led the brand strategy and go-to-market plan, and
A global project to map their desired customer experience, along with the technology systems and data required to deliver that experience, which I co-led with my CTO.
Brand Platform
Hawaiian Airlines was a fantastic airline, flying to an amazing destination. However people would only fly Hawaiian Airlines because they’re going to Hawaii…but other paradises had become the more obvious choice, and they got rational benefits flying with our competitors. So we needed to reposition the brand for growth.
A strategic shift was needed away from just ‘experiencing the Hawaiian sights, sounds, smells and tastes’, which our competitors had misappropriated. I led a small team, which centred in on what was truely unique about Hawaiian Airlines - which is that they come from Hawaii, and the Hawaiian culture is embedded in everything that they do. We felt we needed to move strategically to owning the true meaning of ‘aloha’, and to allow travellers to ‘feel the Hawaiian spirit and way of life’.
This lead to a new brand platform of ‘Return with Aloha’, recognition that when you return from a holiday to Hawaii with Hawaiian Airlines, you return with a sense of inner peace and happiness. ‘Return to Aloha’ was brought to life in a film used for OLV, which we used for the brand relaunch.
Hawaiian Airlines brand video
Go-To-Market Plan
Once we had agreed on ‘Return with Aloha’a brand platform, we needed to build out our go-to-market plan for the marketing campaign.
My team worked closely with the media agency to agree the media plan, so we could be very precise with the assets types and formats required, and with the messaging required for each asset depending upon where it sat in the customer journey. My team built out the customer journey, showing how ‘Return with Aloha’ would come to life at every stage.
We brought the go-to-market campaign together in a ‘platform orchestration map’ which showed how all of the campaign elements worked together throughout the customer journey to deliver a holistic campaign. The platform orchestration map includes a combination of strategic insight, creative ideas, media targeting and shows how we intended to bring ‘Return with Aloha’ to life. We printed it onto a board that was 5m x 1.5m and used it as the central conversation point when taking the campaign to market.
We successfully rolled out the multi-channel campaign over the following 12 months.
Customer Experience Map
After working with Hawaiian Airlines for 18 months, they approached us to help out with a global project. They needed help mapping their existing customer experience, and identifying how to improve it. This information was required so they could brief their technology team on their technology requirements, which they had been unable to do successfully.
I worked with my CTO leading a small team to run a series of virtual workshops with a range of staff from different divisions. Each group focused on a different phase of the customer journey, and we worked together to map out the key moments, the pain points and gain points and channels of interaction. After documenting those elements, we held a second series of workshops during which we identified opportunities for Hawaiian Airlines; and a third series during which we looked at the technology side - identifying the tech/platforms, data and processes that enable the interactions, along with the signals and actions required.
All of this was mapped into the above Customer Experience Map, which was presented back to Hawaiian Airlines along with a more detailed report on the technical side. This work was then used to:
Create projects to improve the customer experience, and
Form the scope of a major technology program of work to upgrade the systems required to deliver the customer experience.
Impact
The ‘Return with Aloha’ marketing campaign was very successful, results included:
Increased bookings by 19.5% YOY. Long Haul Bookings increased by 12.6% against a target of 6%, despite a decrease in Available Seat Miles (i.e. less seats were available on the Australia & New Zealand routes).
Increased share of travellers by 22% YOY. This was with a smaller media spend compared to our competitors (Qantas, Jetstar, Virgin).
Increased brand awareness across Australia & New Zealand, including a 33% increase in Queensland where Hawaiian opened a new route.
The customer experience design project kick-started a major technology investment program to strategically create the foundation for the desired customer experience. This program had previously been stalled due to the marketing team not knowing their full set of requirements and therefore not being able to communicate them to the technology team.